Downwardly Mobile

The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

Andrew Lawson

Combines the methods of social and economic history with detailed close readings

Challenges the dominant periodization of realism, locating the rise of realist writing in the antebellum period of the market revolution rather than during the postwar consolidation of capitalism

Argues for the centrality of class as an analytic category in American literary history

Downwardly Mobile

The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

Andrew Lawson

Description

In the unstable economy of the nineteenth-century, few Americans could feel secure. Paper money made values less tangible, while a series of financial manias, panics, and depressions clouded everyday life with uncertainty and risk. In this groundbreaking study, Andrew Lawson traces the origins of American realism to a new structure of feeling: the desire of embattled and aspiring middle class for a more solid and durable reality.The story begins with New England authors Susan Warner and Rose Terry Cooke, whose gentry-class families became insolvent in the wake of the 1837 Panic, and moves to the western frontier, where the early careers of Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells were shaped by a constant struggle for social position and financial
security. We see how the pull of downward social mobility affected even the outwardly successful, bourgeois family of Henry James in New York, while the drought-stricken wheat fields of Iowa and South Dakota produced the most militant American realist, Hamlin Garland. For these writers, realism offered to stabilize an uncertain world by capturing it with a new sharpness and accuracy. It also revealed a new cast of social actors-factory workers, slaves, farm laborers, the disabled, and the homeless, all victims of an unregulated market.Combining economic history and literary analysis to powerful effect, Downwardly Mobile shows how the fluctuating fortunes of the American middle class forced the emergence of a new kind of literature, while posing difficult political choices about how
the middle class might remedy its precarious condition.

Downwardly Mobile

The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

Andrew Lawson

Author Information

Andrew Lawson is Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle.

Downwardly Mobile

The Changing Fortunes of American Realism

Andrew Lawson

Reviews and Awards

"Downwardly Mobile is innovative in its approach, clearly and pleasingly written, and it will be of great interest not only to scholars of realism but, more generally, to those active in American literary and cultural studies." --Amy Schrager Lang, author of The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America

"Downwardly Mobile is a strikingly original and erudite study: a significant accomplishment. Lawson's work represents one of the best instances I've seen of an emerging formation of scholarship that combines a variety of intellectual commitments that used to be thought incompatible: careful historicism (including local storytelling and big-picture analyses), loving attention to writerly style, respect for a greatly expanded canon, and easy interweaving of several strands of critical theory (Marxism/materialism, psychoanalysis, queer theory) without any intrusive terminology or apparatus." --Nancy Glazener, author of Reading for Realism: The History of a U. S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910

"Lawson's book reminds us of the crucial and fundamental questions that must be asked whenever we talk about realism." --Review 19

"[Lawson's] advanced argument is solidly supported, innovative, and valuable to those interested not only in American realism but in cultural materialism, history, and social and economic movements." --Studies in American Naturalism

"Just as realist writers clarified the real, Lawson clarifies why realism emerged when it did. Like the IMF and its flowchart, or the realist novels themselves, Lawson helps us trace something -- the origins of literary realism -- that would otherwise remain obscure." --The Journal of American Studies